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Just Saying Yes to the Politics of Drugs

EARLIER this month, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida opened up on a subject he had once chided reporters for asking about: his daughter, Noelle, who, he said, “was addicted to drugs.”

In a video released by the campaign, Mr. Bush speaks plainly about his daughter’s struggle, her time in jail and drug court, and her recovery. “I can look in people’s eyes and I know that they’ve gone through the same thing that Columba and I have,” he said, referring to his wife.

Mr. Bush is not the only candidate to share this sort of painful personal experience. Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, has spoken out about losing her stepdaughter, Lori Ann Fiorina, to “the demons of addiction” at the age of 35. And Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey spoke candidly and emotionally about a law school friend who died of a Percocet overdose.

What’s behind this newfound willingness on the candidates’ part to talk about the personal toll of addiction?

New Hampshire, and the sobering statistics on drug overdoses there, is probably part of the answer.

Every day, 44 people in the United States die as a result of overdose on prescription painkillers. Every day, nearly 7,000 people are treated in emergency rooms for abusing painkillers. Overdose deaths have been creeping upward since the beginning of the 21st century — especially deaths from opiate abuse. In New Hampshire, overdose deaths linked to opiate abuse have more than doubled over the past two years.

Ted Gatsas, the Republican mayor of Manchester, N.H., said he had had many opportunities to talk to Republican candidates, including Mr. Bush, Mr. Christie, Donald J. Trump, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, about the heroin and prescription-painkiller abuse in his state. He thinks that the overdose problem has been severely underestimated, not just in his city and state, but nationwide.

“I just don’t think anybody, until you put the numbers and talk to them about it, knows that it’s this bad across this country,” he said.

Nearly 50 years into the “war on drugs,” which both Republican and Democratic leaders have waged in various ways, with various disastrous outcomes, drug overdoses reached a record high in 2014. From 2001 to 2014, the United States had more than a threefold increase in deaths from opioid pain relievers, and a sixfold increase in heroin overdoses, according to the National Institutes of Health. During the same period, overdose deaths from prescription drugs like Valium and Klonopin — sedatives called benzodiazepines — increased by five times.

In speaking about their own experiences, Republican candidates are not only allowing themselves to be vulnerable in front of voters, they’re also straying from the just-say-no message of Ronald Reagan, whose legacy includes a tough legislative stance on drugs and drug sentencing. They’re also hoping that voters, especially in early primary states, will empathize.

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Credit
Cheryl Senter for The New York Times

Grant Smith, a lobbyist with Drug Policy Action, said it was remarkable how much airtime addiction was getting. “If you look over the last two decades, we’ve definitely seen a transformation in how elected officials talk about people who use drugs,” he said. Now there’s more empathy, less scolding. He is glad to see the new rhetoric about addiction, but notes that candidates have become more open about this issue as it has started to take a real toll on largely white communities.

“There’s no question that the shift in who is being impacted by overdose and the attendant harms of drug use to rural and suburban communities has made lawmakers as well as candidates for office more comfortable talking about these issues,” he said. “It’s just that African-American communities have endured high overdose rates for decades, and few lawmakers in Washington cared.”

At a forum at Southern New Hampshire University earlier this month, Governor Kasich spoke with refreshing candor about what some call this “gentrification of addiction.”

“Sometimes I wonder how African-Americans must have felt when drugs were awash in their community and nobody watched,” he said. “Now it’s in our communities, and now all of a sudden we’ve got forums, and God bless us, but think about the struggles that other people had.”

So far, the proposed plans from the candidates to combat addiction have remained frustratingly vague. Mr. Bush’s plan is one exception: It would increase access to drug courts, which allow some nonviolent drug offenders to undergo medical treatment instead of serving jail time, and would also reduce some mandatory minimum sentences.

Beyond criminal justice reform, there is the public health aspect of providing assistance. The Affordable Care Act requires health insurance plans to cover treatment for substance abuse. The Republican candidates who want to repeal Obamacare should answer this question: If you succeed, how will you fund treatment for drug users?

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Finally, there remains the problem of the government classification of different drugs. The Drug Enforcement Administration, formally if not informally, still considers marijuana more dangerous and more addictive than the prescription painkillers and sedatives that accounted for more than 25,000 overdose deaths in 2014.

In Manchester, as Mayor Gatsas welcomes a parade of candidates, he also sees plenty of constituents dealing with the ravages of addiction. Mothers crying, parents writing obituaries that frankly state that their sons and daughters died from heroin overdoses.

“With this epidemic, it’s crossed every boundary. It’s young to old, rich to poor, white to black,” he said. “I tell them, ‘If it hasn’t affected you yet, just wait. It will.’ ”

It’s almost as if it’s a universal issue — which is something the candidates are starting to realize too.

E­mma Roller, a former reporter for National Journal, is a contributing opinion writer. This is an article from Campaign Stops at nytimes­.com­/campaignstops.